Bloody diamonds and bloody scriptwriting (with spoilers)

• Author: Kim
• Filed under: 'Ze Think Tank, Movies
• Date: Feb 13,2007

Come on. Everyone loved that movie. Blood diamonds is lush and action-packed beginning 3 minutes since the start of the movie. You get African rebels portrayed “tactfully” as raging, heroin-driven, smoking, drinking, gangstah copycats who believe in toppling a government who is equally dubious. Nontheless, that’s not the entire point of the film. Because the film is really about the struggle of an African man who got caught by these rebels, and is suddenly caught in the unfolding of catastrophic yet serendipitous events (to make a plot, of course) caused by his discovery of the biggest goddamn pink diamond they’ve seen around those parts. Yummy, so the story begins.

So you have Leonardo di Caprio on one hand and the gorgeous Jennifer Connelly on the other who adds to your staple Hollywood aesthetically-pleasing tandem. Except, they’re not as romantic, you know. They didn’t kiss, they most certainly didn’t get jiggy and the plus part is that Leonardo owes a lot of his charm to his being an asshole. It would have been great if the romance unfolded with the two retaining that kind of bullheadedness. The director, I assume, said cut somewhere just when they’re intense enough to finally have closure over some “things left unsaid”. But really, what am I complaining about?

Sorry to crack your ideal scenario here, but seriously: Blood Diamonds is as cheesy as mozarella. They run around Africa after some Diamond with the wits of a headless chicken then they decide to throw lines reminiscent of Darth Vader’s “I am your father” and top it all off with that memorable acronym: T.I.A. Come on!!! T.I.A. can mean This Is America…or This Is Australia (which on some parts actually have red soil) but what I have to say T.I.A. ought to mean is Take It, Asshole. Yeah, that’s the spirit. Just take the friggin’ diamond and get on with your lives, okay? (And where was I?) Now, you can’t expect to be within a crossfire and be able to have that profound moment of realization inbetween. And what’s worse is, they forget that people are shooting guns for a moment just so they can stare at each other and say the things to each other you’d hear in a soap opera.

Plus, if you have an eye pastry serving of Mr. Di Caprio and Ms. Connelly in the same movie, you might as well exhaust their millions-of-dollars worth of paycheck and get them together for some serious sentimentalist treat. Hollywood is all about taking your cake and eating it, right? You have got to do better than a last phone call. That was heart breaking but, you know, you let the African dude carry you a considerable distance up a mountain, what gives?

Please, please, please, don’t tell me the African dude turned in to an altruist in the end and started the whole wave of getting people to stop buying “conflict-free” diamonds. Ahem.

“Excuse me, I see a lot of conflict in this diamond. Are you absolutely sure it’s conflict-free?”

“Yes.”

“I’m insisting it ought to be conflict-free!”

“It is conflict free!” (Jeweller doesn’t even know where the stupid diamond came from…)

“Okay…”

(And imagine that somewhere in Africa, someone found the next conflict-trodden diamond. Wahoo! On to Tiffanys.)